Senior Applied Scientist, Alexa Sensitive Content Intelligence

Alexa+ is Amazon’s next-generation, AI-powered virtual assistant. Building on the original Alexa, it uses generative AI to deliver a more conversational, personalized, and effective experience. Alexa Sensitive Content Intelligence (ASCI) team is developing responsible AI (RAI) solutions for Alexa+, empowering it to provide useful information responsibly. The team is currently looking for Senior Applied Scientists with a strong background in NLP and/or CV to design and develop ML solutions in the RAI space using generative AI across all languages and countries. A Senior Applied Scientist will be a tech lead for a team of exceptional scientists to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art in NLP or CV related tasks. You will work in a hybrid, fast-paced organization where scientists, engineers, and product managers work together to build customer facing experiences. You will collaborate with and mentor other scientists to raise the bar of scientific research in Amazon. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech, language, and computer vision technologies. We are looking for a leader with strong technical experience and a passion for building science-driven solutions in a fast-paced environment. You should have a good understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML), Dialog Management, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and Audio Signal Processing and know how to apply them in different business cases. You leverage your exceptional technical expertise, a sound understanding of the fundamentals of Computer Science, and practical experience of building large-scale distributed systems to create reliable, scalable, and high-performance products. In addition to technical depth, you must possess exceptional communication skills and understand how to influence key stakeholders. You will be joining a select group of people making history producing one of the most highly-rated products in Amazon's history; if you are looking for a challenging and innovative role where you can solve important problems while growing as a leader, this may be the place for you. Key job responsibilities You’ll lead the science solution design, run experiments, research new algorithms, and find new ways of optimizing customer experience. You set examples for the team on good science practice and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and innovation, you will work closely with talented engineers and ML scientists to put your algorithms and models into practice. Your work will directly impact the trust customers place in Alexa, globally. You contribute directly to our growth by hiring smart and motivated scientists to establish teams that can deliver swiftly and predictably, adjusting in an agile fashion to deliver what our customers need. A day in the life You will be working with a group of talented scientists on researching algorithms and running experiments to test scientific proposals/solutions to improve our sensitive content detection and mitigation. This will involve collaboration with partner teams including engineering, PMs, data annotators, and other scientists to discuss data quality, policy, and model development. You will mentor other scientists, review and guide their work, help develop roadmaps for the team, and work closely with partner teams across Alexa to deliver platform features that require cross-team leadership. About the team The mission of the Alexa Sensitive Content Intelligence (ASCI) team is to (1) minimize negative surprises to customers caused by sensitive content, (2) detect and prevent potential brand-damaging interactions, and (3) build customer trust through appropriate interactions on sensitive topics. The term “sensitive content” includes within its scope a wide range of categories of content such as offensive content (e.g., hate speech, racist speech), profanity, content that is suitable only for certain age groups, politically polarizing content, and religiously polarizing content. The term “content” refers to any material that is exposed to customers by Alexa (including both 1P and 3P experiences) and includes text, speech, audio, and video. Basic Qualifications 4+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience PhD, or Master’s degree and 6+ years of applied research experience Knowledge of programming languages such as C/C++, Python, Java or Perl Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning Preferred Qualifications Experience with modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, Tensorflow, numpy, scipy etc. PhD Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner. 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